This Ancient Trade Colony is a Time Capsule of Assyria’s Grand Past
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Situated between the basin of the Upper Euphrates, the Upper Halys, and the rivers of Cilicia is an archaeological site known to the ancient Assyrians as Kanesh. Today, this site is located in the Kayseri Province in central Türkiye and is known locally as Kültepe, from the Turkish word meaning “ash mound”.
In antiquity, Kanesh was the centre of a sophisticated trade network established by the Assyrians in the second millennium BCE, connecting Assyria with Anatolia. This sprawling site was inhabited from the Early Bronze age until it’s abandonment during the late Roman (Byzantine) period; then, it was left in ruins hidden beneath the soil of modern-day Kültepe until its discovery.
This commercial settlement was commonly called the Kārum, an Assyrian word meaning “quay” where merchants would gather. In fact, Assyrian mule caravans— from Assyria —arrived at Kanesh with trade commodities such as copper, garments, gold, silver, tin, and various other textiles.
© Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), Accession No: 66.245.16b
Approximately 20,000 administrative tablets have been excavated at this site, mostly relating to disputes, sales contracts, loans, as well as wills and marriage agreements between Assyrians and Anatolians at Kanesh. This complex body of work also provides us with significant insight into the social and economic culture at Kanesh, particularly about the lives of it’s inhabitants.
According to historians, the tablets from Kanesh could possibly represent the largest body of private texts ever found anywhere in the Middle East. They were not only kept in archive rooms but neatly arranged inside clay vessels, wooden chests, as well as wicker baskets or sacks.
The cities of this Assyrian trade colony comprised of stone-paved streets (with subterranean drainage channels) and private residential quarters. Households were constructed with mud-bricks rising above stone foundations and supported by timber beams.
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Kültepe is situated about 22 km north-west of Kayseri, within close proximity to the village of Karahöyük. The archaeological mound is about 20 m high and 550 m in diameter.
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Larsen, Mogens Trolle. “The Old Assyrian Colonies in Anatolia.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 94, no. 4, 1974, pp. 468–75. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/600590. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.
Veenhof, K. R., Sasson, J. M., & Baines, J. (1995). Kanesh: An Assyrian colony in Anatolia. Civilizations of the ancient Near East; 2, 859-871.
